Mr. Buzard

Thank you Colu and Odd Duck for the awesome responses! Odd Duck- This is super generous of you to give so much time to helping us figure this out! We have talked with our teacher and we have a microscope that has video and picture capabilities. We also have microscope slides and two teachers that are willing to help us on Friday afternoon. Our issue is that the only stains that we have are bromothymol blue and phenol red, which we are assuming will not work for this purpose. We have looked into purchasing a Gram's Staining Kit and a Wright Giemsa stain kit and have been approved to make that purchase, but it seems that it won't get to us until Monday. Is that too long to wait? Should we move the fish now to our QT tank and start a salt treatment? Will that throw off our ability later to identify what we are dealing with under a microscope? Is there another medication we should start in the mean time? Thanks again for all of your willingness to assist us and teach us how to take care of our fish. This was a super cool message to wake up to and seems like a good learning experience for us!

We are a group of four middle school students that are responsible for taking care of our school aquarium. We have a 75 gallon planted community tank that has been established for about 9 years. Each year, a group of students trains the next group of students to take care of the tank. We are in our second and final year of being the aquarium team and will be passing it off to a new group next year. We are in need of some help with identifying a pleco's sickness. We have two nice long-fin albino bristlenose plecos that are about 7 or 8 years old. They were born in our teacher's father's tank and are fairly special fish in our aquarium. We noticed some white spots on them this week on the fins, tail, and body. We haven't noticed any spots on any of the other fish in the tank, and we haven't added any new fish since last school year. Any new additions to our tank are always quarantined for 3-4 weeks and are treated with salt while in the quarantine tank. We have our quarantine tank being set-up again right now so that we can move these fish, if needed. We have the quarantine tank filter running on the main tank to try to speed up the cycling process. Based on our pictures, can anyone identify what we are dealing with and how to best treat them? We do not think that it is ich, especially because it is not on any of the other fish, however, we might be wrong. Please advise and help us keep our school tank healthy : )